A technology recruiter once told me he wouldn’t dare proposing anyone over 40 to clients.

The recruiter was well past this age and shamefaced. He said clients don’t want to see older faces waiting outside the interview room.

Information technology companies and users are among the worst offenders for age discrimination, closely followed by public relations, media and telecom companies.

In some ways these industries are more honest and upfront about their prejudices. Age discrimination is not restricted to these industries, you’ll find it everywhere, I know of one person applying to work in a department store being turned down for being too old. She was in her 40s.

I passed the 50 barrier a few months ago. I’m not complaining about my circumstances, as far as I know, most editors don’t care about the age of a freelance journalist – in my business other things matter.

However, I am concerned about the feedback I get from people of a similar age who read my writing on the subject.

Let's put this age barrier into context. People my age are not old.

While those of us who have just passed 50 might have been alive in the 1960s and probably can hum more than a dozen Beatles tunes, I didn’t come of age until after the Sex Pistols and the Clash appeared. One of my first printed stories was an interview with The Stranglers.

Admittedly my early years in journalism were spent hammering on a manual typewriter, but my first paying job was on an already established personal computer magazine. And yes, it is true that the last time I looked at a line of programming code, it was written in Pascal.

On the other hand, I should point out I’m four years younger than Bill Gates – does anyone out there regard him as over the hill?

Maybe they do. After all, he has retired. And the people recruiting staff for Microsoft probably would almost certainly regard Mr Gates as too old for employment.

Cruel, unpleasant, short-sighted, wasteful and stupid are just some words describing the attitude of many employers towards hiring older knowledge workers.

I’ve used the word ‘older’ in the opening sentence, but the age threshold we’re talking about is barely middle-aged.

Put it this way, if you’ve been around long enough to remember where the headline on this story originally came from then you’d better watch out because by many recruiters’ standards you are already over the hill.

Over the years I’ve spoken to or been in contact with workers, employers and recruiters who believe anyone over the age of 40 will find it hard going looking for a job in knowledge industries.

This gives the lie to all the fancy talk we hear about the value of experience. At the point in their life when a knowledge worker has built up enough personal experience to know what they are doing, they drop off the employers’ wish list.

While the much talked about skills shortage of recent years is no longer pressing, you have to ask yourself what was going on when employers bemoaned the lack of trained workers and at the same time refused to consider anyone with grey hair.

Some older workers complain they didn’t get interviews or replies to their enquiries about vacancies even at the height of the skills shortage.

At the same time I heard from freshly minted graduates who couldn’t through the door. That sets the age limits for desirable recruits at roughly between 25 and 40 – a  small percentage of most people’s productive working lives.

Alaina Love's Cutting mature workers widens the wisdom deficit echoes earlier Knowledge Workers stories. She writes; "Companies that cut seasoned employees without considering the wisdom and knowledge lost are making an expensive, if not disastrous, mistake."

Love is right on the money. There's a temptation to cut older workers because they cost more than younger workers. However, that higher price is what companies have been willing to pay in order to buy access to the contents of the older worker's head.

via Cutting Mature Workers Widens the Wisdom Deficit – BusinessWeek.

While people get knocked back because of their age, many older executives take such a negative approach to finding a job that they damage their own prospects.

That's what Denis Baker the employment consultant and author of “Personal Job Hunting” told me when I interviewed him for a Sydney Morning Herald story on the problems facing older knowledge workers.

Baker says he has seen a number of 50-plus executives find employment in recent years.

Defensive interviews

“I’ve seen people who have gone to job interviews and started out on the defensive. They apologise for their age rather than talk about the positives they have to offer. And they do have a lot to offer. Older people don’t just have technical work skills; they’ve usually picked up a lot of life skills along the way that translate well to the workplace.”

Baker says older job seeker should not list work experience but prepare personal skill inventories. They should also list skills acquired outside the workforce. “Employers are often looking for initiative, so think of ways you can show this quality.”

One other important factor is to show an ability to listen and learn. Baker says younger managers are wary of hiring older executives who constantly tell them how to do things, although if the candidate shows willing and can diplomatically pass on expertise, that’s a big plus.

Remember:

1. Don’t apologise about being old.
2. Prepare a list of all the technical work skills you’ve accumulated over the years.
3. Create a similar inventory of your life skills showing what else you can bring to the workplace.
4. Show that while you may be an old dog, you can still learn new tricks.

Employers can't legally turn down job applicants because of their age. Yet age discrimination is common, especially when it comes to filling executive positions.

Some years ago I interviewed Trevor Moir for the Sydney Morning Herald. Moir, an accountant by profession, runs the Executives’ Co-ordination Group, a Sydney-based organisation for older, unemployed executives. He says employers turn down or don't even consider many of his members because they are past an unwritten sell-by date.

When I spoke to Moir in the early 2000s, his group had 51 active members, mainly from Sydney’s North Shore. The membership included accountants, bankers, lawyers, engineers, marketing and advertising executives, airline industry workers and IT specialists. In addition, Moir received a constant stream of mail and phone calls from similarly unemployed executives around the country.

No reply

He said, “Some of our guys have written hundreds of application letters but have never even received a reply.” Moir had similar experiences himself before he formed the group.

According to Moir, recruitment firms are the biggest barrier to employment for older executives. “They’re the first line in the battle. If you get past them and speak to an employer, you have a fighting chance.”

At times the experiences of Moir’s member were positively surreal. For example, a recruitment consultant told one member he should dye his greying hair before attending an interview.

How old is too old?

Which prompts a question; just how old is too old? According to Moir the age where discrimination kicks in has dropped in recent years. He has group members in their early 40s.

It can get worse. Employment consultant Denis Baker told me he saw an extreme case where an employer to a 30-year-old he was too old for a job. On the other hand, he says he saw an American study arguing the best workers are between 55 and 65.

The researchers found this group is highly focused – mainly because they know they have one last chance to make money before retirement. They tend to work hard, have better skills and take less sick leave.

Age discrimination unsustainable

The good news for older executives is that demographics mean age discrimination is unsustainable in the long-term. In most of the world’s rich countries they workforce is aging so fast that soon employers won’t have the luxury of turning down skilled, experienced workers.

According to research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1998 only three percent of the workforce was between 60 and 65, by 2016 that age group will account for 15 percent of workers. By then more than half of all workers will be over 45.

Although discrimination against older workers is commonplace around the world, it seems more entrenched here. Only 49 percent of Australians aged between 55 and 64 are in the workforce, this compares with 59 percent of American workers in the same age group, 60 percent of New Zealanders and up to 65 percent in some parts of Scandinavia.

Employers are not looking for experience despite what the recruitment advertisements say. That's the view of Computerworld writer Paul Glen.

He says;

…if experience is at such a premium, why are there so many articles about how hard it is for older IT workers to find a job?

Glen says;

People don't really absorb the lessons that their experience offers. In one sense, they haven't so much gained experience as they have had things happen to them. They become neither knowledgeable nor jaded. They haven't processed the ideas or compared real-world happenings with their theories of how the world works. Without this processing, experience isn't really a great teacher or a cruel one; it's only a way to mark the passage of time.

So much for information technology.

In my industry, publishing, you learn by dealing with events as they happen. Eventually you build up a stock of  mental tools that mean you can deal with previously unmet situations. This is called experience.

Working on tight deadlines and quick turn-around news stories is different from being an IT specialist.

I suggest experience makes many aspects of work so much easier they fade into the background. This leaves plenty of spare brainpower and energy to deal with the bigger issues. There may not be a perfect correlation between experience and knowledge or wisdom, but there's certainly a link.